Animation behind the iron curtain: a guide to animated films from Russia and eastern bloc countries during the Cold War era

of DeBlasio’s text is so fitting for its main protagonist, one can’t help but wonder what could be gained if the book was organised chronologically rather than thematically. What if the discussions of all the films of the 1980s were clustered together, including Mamardashvili’s own discussion of Vadim Abdrashitov and Aleksandr Mindadze’s film The Train Stopped (1982)? While the book does a good job at historicising some aspects of Mamardashvili’s philosophy, there are some aspects that seem missing. While there are some convincing arguments about the social and political in Chapter 3 on Mamuliya’s Another Sky (2010), the transition between the Soviet and the post-Soviet periods is in the background but is never properly addressed. For a book on a Marxist philosopher interested in consciousness, The filmmaker’s philosopher has very little on any aspects of late Soviet Marxism. While Mamardashvili died in 1990, before the Soviet Union collapsed, what does his lasting influence on post-Soviet filmmakers tell us about those filmmakers or his philosophy in terms of politics? Perhaps it is one of the speculative questions the book inspires rather than criticism. I hope DeBlasio’s book can be used as a springboard for future researchers to look into other issues of Mamardashvili’s work, but also into the larger intellectual history of the late Soviet period, as well as the individual filmmakers. Chapters on Sokurov and Balabanov are great additions to studies of these auteurs, covering their lesser-known films (Balabanov’s cinema is still awaiting a book-length study in the English language). The conclusion, which discusses Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Loveless (2017) and questions of film philosophy, is an intriguing end to a compelling study. It is a must read for anybody interested in Soviet film and culture and for scholars interested in film and philosophy.